My Nephew Harry
by Lucillia
Summary: During the two months she had watched her eight year-old nephews, Marge Dursley discovered that Petunia was a pathological liar, Vernon had somehow been brainwashed by that no good b***h, Dudley was the spawn of Satan, and Harry was actually a good kid.
1. Temporary Guardianship

When asked about it years later, Marge Dursley couldn't exactly remember why she had taken the other boy home with her that day when she'd gone to the hospital to pick up her nephew. Back then, she had believed the boy to be the lying, sniveling, thieving, retarded and abnormal brat her brother had claimed him to be. The time she spent caring for the boy while she waited for her brother and his wife to get out of he hospital had opened her eyes and changed her mind about the child who had been far more of an angel than her "Precious Nephipoo" Dudley. That time with the boy had also taught her that Petunia was a lying weasel who wouldn't know the truth if it bit her in the ass.

It had all started on a seemingly ordinary day when...

Marge had been taking her afternoon tea at the time the officer came to the door to notify her that her brother and his wife had gotten into a serious accident and had been badly injured and taken to the hospital. The children, through some miracle, had walked away with only minor injuries and needed a place to stay until her brother and Petunia were released. She had been listed as the next of kin, and guardian to her nephew if something happened to her brother.

The next morning, she drove to the hospital to retrieve her precious nephew who was undoubtedly traumatized by the experience he'd been through. Little Dudley was bawling his eyes out, completely inconsolable no matter what the nurses tried to do when she arrived. In contrast, the other one, the one she had no blood ties to, was sitting in a corner silently staring off into space.

She probably would have left the runt behind for Children's Services to deal with that day if the nurse hadn't run after her with the boy in tow. The only reason she took the boy when the nurse handed him to her had been because it would have been completely inappropriate to make a scene at the hospital where her brother was recovering. On the ride home, her precious Dudley loudly demanded food and continuously inquired as to whether they had reached their destination as a child his age should. The runt remained quiet and put up with Dudley's constant poking and hitting without trying to defend himself.

When she got home, it was more of the same. Dudley was a boisterous child as a healthy boy his age should be, and the other one was quiet, and hid himself in an out of the way corner until it was time for dinner. At dinner she gave the runt a larger serving of food in order to fatten him up a bit, though it would most likely be wasted on him since he'd never reach a healthy weight because he suffered from some genetic disorder whose name she had forgotten. The boy looked up at her like a dog who had been kicked too many times and knew better than to expect kindness. She had to order the runt to eat, unlike her precious nephew who didn't need to be told. When it came time to go to bed, her precious nephew threw a temper tantrum at not being allowed to stay up late. The runt however, didn't complain at all, even when he was given the lumpy couch in the storage room to sleep on because Dudley needed her only guest room.

Without her brother or his wife to intercede and take Dudley away when he got to be a little too much for her to handle, her precious nephew's "boisterous" behavior began to grate on her nerves. The final straw came a week after she brought the boys home with her when Dudley knocked over the urn containing her mother's ashes while she was in the next room over and had the gall to blame the runt who she knew for a fact was in the kennel feeding the dogs as he had been ordered.

This, unbeknownst to her, marked a turning point in her views about "the runt" who for the past week she had been watching like a hawk, waiting for him to set one toe out of line. The runt whom she had learned was special.

**Edited 7/21/12.**


	2. Punishing the Wrong Boy

Marge had a good bit of time to think as she carefully swept her mother's ashes into the urn that her "Precious Nephipoo" had knocked over. Said nephew had wandered away from the corner she had put him in despite his loud complaints the instant her back was turned, and would be paying for disobeying her later if she had anything to say about it. If she had done that when she was his age, her father would have tanned her hide with his belt. In fact if she had done even a fraction of what Dudley had done over the past week, she would not have been able to sit down for more than a month.

She had let the behavior slide because of the extreme circumstances, and the fact that she had been keeping more of an eye on the other boy, which, now that she stopped to think about it, had been a big mistake...

On the first evening after she had brought her nephew and the runt home, Dudley had thrown one hell of a temper tantrum because he hadn't wanted to go to bed at the appropriate time. If she or Vernon had done that when they were the same age Dudley was now, they would have gotten the belt. The runt in contrast had slunk off to the couch she had banished him to without a sound. She had thought that it had been because the runt had been planning to misbehave later, and had considered punishing him for it and whatever he thought he could get away with, but she had been too tired to do so after dealing with her nephew who had finally tired himself out and fallen asleep.

The next morning, she had carefully checked her belongings and meticulously counted all of the silverware, mindful of Petunia's tales of how the runt would steal anything that wasn't nailed down if you gave him half a chance to do so. Everything was in place except for a tin of biscuits which Dudley promptly informed her the runt had stolen. She had promptly introduced the runt to the cane she kept in the umbrella stand before sending him out to clean the kennels. Hard work kept delinquent children like him out of mischief. The runt worked in the kennels all day, and that evening, at dinner, which she begrudgingly gave the runt since he had completed the chores she had assigned, she once again had to tell the little hooligan to eat. Dudley, who was a healthy weight never needed any prompting in that area. However, throughout the meal her precious nephew had complained about the quality of the food she had served, and demanded everything from pizza to fish and chips. Despite his complaints about the food, her nephew had finished his portion before everyone else with a complete lack of table manners, and snatched the runt's food away from him before devouring that too. Her Dudley was a growing boy and needed lots of food, but the manner in which he had got it would have earned her a smack if she had tried something like that in front of her parents when she was a child. The runt, like the weakling he was didn't even try to get it back.

That night, Dudley threw another tantrum. The runt just slunk off to his couch. She had tolerated her nephew's tantrum, because of the circumstances and the fact that the poor boy's delicate routine had been disrupted in a most traumatic manner. She had been certain that once Dudley had gotten used to his current surroundings and the new routine, he would calm down, and the struggles before bed would eventually cease. Once again, she had been too tired to punish the runt for whatever it was he had been planning.

The next morning, the chocolate cake she had planned on surprising her precious nephew with was the only item missing. She spanked the runt so hard that he wouldn't be able to sit down before sending him out with an even longer list of chores than the day before and informed him that there would be no lunch or dinner for him later before seating her nephew in front of the television. Her precious nephew grew bored with the television after a few hours and started demanding new toys to play with because he didn't want to play with the ones he had packed when they had briefly stopped by her brother's house to get some of the boys' belongings. She decided to indulge him since it was clear that he was so restless because he missed his parents. Putting him in her ancient car, she drove him into town and bought him several expensive toys that she normally would only have gotten for him for either Christmas or his birthday.

When they got back, the runt was weeding the kitchen garden in a somewhat half-assed manner. Her precious Dudley went over to him and promptly started rough-housing with him the instant he got out of the car. The runt didn't even try to defend himself, proving himself to be completely inferior to Dudley. As the saying goes, bad blood will out. That evening at dinner, the runt sat quietly at an empty spot as if this sort of occurrence was normal. Considering how ill behaved Vernon had informed her the boy was (constantly stealing, and breaking Dudley's things), it most likely was. Dudley made a great show of enjoying his meal that evening. That night, Dudley threw another tantrum while the runt slunk off to his couch. Petunia probably knew whatever nightly ritual was necessary to get her son to go to sleep, but she, never having married or had any children, had no clue as to what she should be doing.

Later that night, she awoke to the sound of someone rifling through the cupboards. Eager to catch the runt in the act and put the fear of God into the boy, she crept downstairs moving surprisingly silently for a woman of her size. Instead of finding the runt stealing from her, she found her precious Dudley shoveling handfuls of the pudding she had set aside for tomorrow's dessert into his mouth. She sent her nephew straight back to bed, yelling at him for the first time ever. The next morning, when her daily check revealed that the only thing that wasn't there that had been the night before was the pudding Dudley had ruined, a seed of doubt about the runt's guilt in the two prior thefts had been planted in her mind. The runt seemed rather surprised that he was getting breakfast that morning, and had to be told to eat like every other meal he had in her home.

Around noon, the retired Colonel Fubster who was also known as Alexander G. Fubster Veterinary Surgeon (retired) (who contrary to Marge's requests never actually drowned any of the dogs given to him for said purpose but handed them over to the RSPCA for adoption instead) showed up for his monthly visit to check on the dogs. He did this as a favor to the daughter of the young man who had saved his life during the second World War.

The man who had studied to become a veterinarian after being demobbed at the end of the first World War and ended up joining the military in the mid-30s after the veterinary practice he had been working at failed would do anything to help the family of William Dursley who had taken a bullet for him in combat nearly dying in the process. It was for this reason that the elderly man discreetly took Marge aside after lunch had ended and asked if her brother was having financial problems since it appeared that he couldn't properly feed or clothe his nephew. Colonel Fubuster had also been concerned about the fact that the boy's eye-glasses were obviously the wrong prescription since that could seriously damage his eyes in the future. Her explanations that the boy had destroyed his other glasses and all of his proper clothing were met with skepticism, but the Colonel dropped the subject.

That evening, the runt looked like he couldn't believe his luck when his dinner was set in front of him.

Over the next few days, the household fell into something of a routine. She would wake up to find some sweets missing, such as the chocolates Colonel Fubster had left for her, and punish the runt before sending him out to do chores, some of which she had to make up as she was running out of things for him to do. The runt would sit quietly at the table while she and Dudley ate their lunch, with Dudley whining that his mother always gave him better food than what was set in front of him. Sometime during the afternoon, Dudley would come running to her crying about how the runt had broken one of the expensive toys she had just bought a few days before, and she would punish the runt for breaking the toy before sending him out with more chores. The runt would sit quietly and watch while she and Dudley ate dinner, with Dudley once again demanding foods she didn't have the time or the desire to prepare even with the runt doing all of the hard labor outside. At night, Dudley would throw his nightly fit before bed while the runt would quietly slink off, undoubtedly cooking up nefarious plots as he did so.

Eventually, the first week with her nephew and the runt had come to an end despite the fact that it had seemed interminable during, bringing her back to now...

As she set the urn back on the mantelpiece where it had been, she realized something. When two of Dudley's toys had been broken, the runt had been outside working on the chores she had assigned for him. She knew this for a fact as she had checked to make sure he wasn't slacking off, and she was reasonably certain that Dudley had been playing inside during both of those incidents.

Going to look for her precious nephew, so she could put him back in the corner to finish his punishment, she found him in the kennel hitting the runt who wasn't even trying to defend himself. She didn't know which of the two looked more surprised when she grabbed Dudley's ear to drag him back into the house to finish his time-out after he received a well deserved spanking. All protests that he never got punished and that it had been the "Freak" who had knocked over the urn were to no avail.

That night, when she woke up to go to the bathroom she heard someone in the kitchen rifling through either the fridge or the pantry from the sound of it. Hoping to catch the runt in the act, she once again crept downstairs. She wished she had been more surprised than she was to find Dudley with his hand in the raspberry jam. She gave him the second spanking he had ever received in his entire life before sending him back to bed. Checking on the runt, she found him sleeping fitfully as if he were in the throes of a nightmare, his blanket kicked to the floor. He looked even smaller and more pathetic in the pyjamas that she had sent to Dudley for Christmas two years earlier. No wonder he was so thin, considering the fact that he seemed to be lucky to get more than one meal a day with all of the punishments he received.

Not knowing why, she put his blanket back over him before heading back to bed herself.

The next morning, as she was gathering her laundry for the wash, she realized that she would have to do Dudley and the runt's laundry too since there were two things she wasn't going to allow the boys to touch, the stove and the washing machine. Going into the guest room that she had given her nephew, she discovered it to be a disaster zone. The bed was unmade, the toys that he had brought with him as well as the toys she had bought him were scattered everywhere, and none of his clothing was in the laundry hamper she had provided. If she had left her room like this when she was eight, her father would have gone after her with the belt. In contrast, the runt's clothes had all been in the downstairs hamper, neatly folded. While she was sorting Dudley's things for the wash after having been forced to gather them all herself, she found her eyes narrowing in suspicion at the crumbs she had picked up with the clothing. Her suspicions were confirmed when she found a Dudley-sized handprint in chocolate on one pyjama top, eliminating the possibility of a frame job by the runt. She had been punishing the wrong boy all along.

As she wondered why the runt would take the punishments without protest, she remembered a boy down the road that she had been friends with with when she was a little girl. His younger brother used to enjoy constantly getting him in trouble for things he didn't do. Every time he claimed he was innocent, he would be punished even worse for "lying". He eventually learned to take his undeserved punishments in silence. The truth was, after years of hearing Petunia's constant litany of the runt's alleged crimes that ranged from theft to cheating on schoolwork she would have been predisposed to believe that the runt was lying if he had even bothered to claim innocence.

As she pre-treated, then threw her "precious" nephew's stained clothes into the wash, she wondered exactly how much of the punishments the runt had received over the years had actually been deserved.

**Edited 7/21/12**


	3. Vernon and Marge Encounter the Supernatu

The fraternal twins Vernon and Marge Dursley had both taken after their father in many ways. While they looked more like their mother, the even tempered, good-natured and rather massive raven haired Agatha Dursley, than the blond mountain of muscle that was their father, their personalities and views on the world had been mostly shaped by the often harsh disciplinarian who had sired them. William Dursley's world was an extremely narrow and rational world that didn't have room for imagination amongst other things (there was a long litany of things from juvenile delinquents to foriegners), and he had passed this world down to his children.

While living in this world made the two rather unpopular to most of the rest of the world except for maybe a bunch of bigots and probably the KKK, unless members of the KKK decided they didn't like their attitude, it worked for them because it was the only world they knew, and neither of them adapted to change very well. They adapted to change eventually, but grudgingly and generally with ill grace, and only after something has rattled the foundations of their world so thoroughly that entirely returning to normal became otherwise impossible.

After Vernon married Petunia and got his first introduction to a world that went against everything he had been taught via his sister-in-law, he had suddenly found the solidly rational world that he had grown up with slipping away from him. He then responded to this by struggling to stay "Normal" in a desperate attempt to ward off the alien world he had discovered lying hidden beneath the one he lived in, and the dangers that came with it. In a few short years, the jovial smile that he had inherited from his mother appeared less and less frequently until it had vanished altogether. The stress of trying to keep everything "Normal" when he knew there was a war going on in the other world that could spill over and destroy his small family as it had Petunia's parents caused his temper to ignite more frequently. Yelling at anyone and everyone at work eventually became his only safe release. By November 1st 1981, Grunnings' newer employees stared at the older ones in incredulous shock when they mentioned how "Vernon Dursley didn't use to be a total bastard before he got that promotion."

Harry Potter's being abandoned on the Dursleys' doorstep ended up badly exacerbating the situation. Not only had a denizen of the unnatural world that Vernon had vainly struggled to forget end up in his home, but the child's presence there was a possible threat to his family due to the number of people who would want to come afer the boy. There was a rather large chance that the followers of the lunatic who had killed the boy's parents would find where the child had been hidden from them and try to finish the job killing those who harbored him in the process. The only reason he allowed Harry to stay was paradoxically out of an inborn sense of duty towards family, creating a rather unstable dichotomy. This naturally added to his stress levels, and he began to blame the boy for it.

When the boy started showing signs of "Freakishness" Vernon took a leaf out of Petunia's book and started punishing the boy in hopes of getting him to stop, since the boy's magic made him more noticeable, putting his family at greater risk. As the child got a little older, he started giving the boy the sort of punishments he had received as a child, which he had hated receiving, and had sworn to himself never to do to a child in his care. The first and only time he had actually used the belt rather than threaten to do so when Harry was three it had sickened him, and he started locking the boy in the cupboard under the stairs instead of spanking him. He ended up moving the boy into the cupboard permanently at the age of four since he "Practically lived in there". When the boy was old enough to understand the concept of chores, he had followed his maternal grandfather's philosophy of "Hard work keeps children out of mischief" which had been a philosophy that his father had adopted from the man as well.

As the boy grew older, Vernon began to hate him even more for making him become everything he had hated in his father whom he had otherwise dearly loved.

Marge's first encounter with "unnatural" phenomena in regards to Harry Potter came two weeks into his stay in her home. While she had eased up considerably on the boy's chores since he obviously wasn't getting into mischief, she wasn't about to have him lazing about doing nothing while he was staying with her. She had seen first hand what happened to children who were allowed to do so when she tried to discipline Dudley from whose name she had progressively dropped all affectionate titles over the past week with some of the work she had given to Harry the week before. It had been a week of headaches and broken objects for her, especially since she wouldn't let him near the dogs after he'd kicked Ripper, and many spankings for Dudley. On the day in question, Harry - who had proven quite talented at household work - had been washing dishes.

Marge happened to walk into the kitchen as Harry dropped a wet plate. Instead of falling to the floor and breaking, it froze in midair for a second until he was able to grab it. Unlike Vernon who seemed to have forgotten it when the seemingly rational world he had lived in had started sliding out from under him while he had tried to cling to it like a dying man in the desert would cling to the first source of water he found, Marge had taken her father's favorite saying to heart. "There's a scientific explanation for everything, even if it hasn't yet been discovered." her father would say before helping her look up an answer to just about any and every question she came to him with. If she had been a slightly less "traditional" woman and hadn't fallen in love with bulldogs the Christmas Colonel Fubster had brought her and her brother a puppy, she could have had a rather successful career in scientific research.

Instead of screaming or lashing out, Marge had first thought that she may have hallucinated the incident. When she had gone through a mental checklist and realized that she wasn't under the influence of anything stronger than the aspirin she had taken for the headache Dudley had given her since she had resolved not to drink while her nephew was under her care, and that she wasn't prone to hallucinations, she decided that what she saw may have been real. She had seen enough horror and science fiction movies to know that people believed that such things were possible, and if such a large number of people believed it was possible, then it was possible that it was possible. What she needed to know was how, which meant a trip to the library like the ones she had taken with her father when she had wanted to know why grass was green, and the sky was blue.

Over the next several days, after reading through several books on a subject called E.S.P and coming to the conclusion that she hadn't imagined the whole incident, she thoroughly grilled Harry about any prior incidents of psychokinesis and began testing him with several of the tests in the books as well as any she could come up with in order to determine his limits. Apparently, unlike in several low budget horror movies or Science Fiction shows, the boy was - like many of the accounts of such people in the more serious books on the subject - relatively normal until he hit a serious emotional extreme such as the fear of dire punishment for breaking a plate as, unlike Vernon who generally limited himself to non-physical punishments for any crime real or imagined, Petunia saw nothing wrong with hitting Harry, and had been completely unaware of his abilities as he saw each incident as some bizarre occurrence that had nothing to do with him.

Having gotten a rational explanation for what she probably would have considered an unnatural event had she not done any research, she mostly put it out of her mind and got on with her life. The boy didn't deliberately use his abilities (though she would have to watch out for that in the future now that he knew about them), and wasn't inclined to go about terrorizing people with them. She could understand how any broken items in her brother's household could be blamed on Harry in light of these abilities, but the truth was that Dudley could be rough on his own and other people's belongings, as he had shown when he'd smashed a whole shelf of her knick-knacks when he refused to do the dusting, and was rather inclined to frame Harry for anything and everything under the sun. It was quite possible that less than one broken item out of ten in Vernon's home had actually been the boy's fault.

She did keep a closer eye on the boy for a while after discovering his abilities, but aside from a couple attempts at lifting small objects with his mind, which apparently took a great deal of concentration, and didn't work half the time, he didn't seem to be consciously using his abilities. She had ruled out mind control as one of the boy's abilities early on, otherwise, Vernon, Petunia, and Dudley would have been waiting on the brat hand and foot rather than the other way around, as it appeared to be if Dudley's stories of how the "Freak" was treated at home were to be believed.

**Edited: 7/22/12**


	4. Dudley the Puppy Kicking Hooligan

The day that Marge Dursley learned that just about everything she thought she knew about Harry Potter's parents had been a lie came three and half weeks after he and Dudley arrived at her home. Prior to her getting some of the facts and changing her views on the Potters whom she had never met, she had attributed Harry's good behavior to Vernon's "training" and had lamented that her brother had never given Dudley any, as it would have done the boy a world of good. To understand in part how this incident came about, you would need to know about a bit of lesser known incident in modern wizarding history and a fact about James Potter that was common knowledge to the Aurors he had trained with in order to gain the skills necessary to aid the Order of the Phoenix during the war, but not so common knowledge to the rest of the wizarding world.

Transporting a nuclear weapon through the wizarding world or by magical means is the only offense on the books with an immediate death penalty, and for good reason, considering the fact that in areas where magic has frequently been cast by large numbers of witches and wizards for centuries or millenia, muggle electronics tended to fail in rather spectacularly and often in an exceedingly unusual manner. The more delicate the electronic device, the worse the effect. The reason most muggle devices such as radios, portable televisions, and radar didn't work at Hogwarts wasn't a matter of it won't work because you need somewhere to plug it in, and the radio signal didn't go over the mountain, it was a matter of the ambient magic that flew through the air in and around the castle got conducted through the wires and whatnot as well as the electricity that came from batteries and jury-rigged generators and fucked with the thing's inner workings, sometimes transfiguring them, sometimes charming them, and almost always screwing with them somehow. There was a reason that the only electrical bit in Colin Creevey's camera which incidentally had belonged to his father before him was the flash, and a reason that even the muggleborn students' watches were analog.

In the aftermath of the "Nuclear Weapon Scare of 1952" in which the American muggleborn wizard Alexander Hinkley had brought a prototype nuclear missile to Hogsmeade with the intention of selling it to the Soviet Union, a Ministry that was well aware of the disaster that could have occured if the missile had been any closer to Hogwarts, since they had received the reports of devastation from the Magical Consulate in Japan regarding Hiroshima and Nagasaki seven years before, started frantically passing laws to prevent such an occurrence from happening on British soil. It was in this period that the half-blooded Auror Lewis Greene who was the son of a Constable in the Metropolitan Police had drafted and submitted a bill that would've never been passed at any other time. It is because of Greene's law that all Auror training since 1953 took three years instead the of two it used to. In the extra year all trainees got muggle police training with the Metropolitan Police and spent the rest of the year working in a muggle police station "To familiarize themselves with the muggle world so they could better blend in and be able to tell if something was wrong". Incidentally, this training proved not to be the waste many Aurors seemed to think it was, because it was this training that enabled Kingsley Shaklebolt to protect the Prime Minister as well as he had after Voldemort's resurrection. The Auror office itself was an unlisted Metropolitan police station, and all Aurors held equivalent ranks with the Metropolitan police.

The law was ostensibly created so that the Aurors who incidentally didn't realize that they were the wizarding equivalent of MI5 rather than the local police had authority in both worlds and could get all necessary assistance in pursuing a suspect that went to ground in the muggle world. There was an added benefit to the law that the Purebloods never noticed and that the law's creator was well aware of however. In times when the budget to the Auror department was cut and Aurors, usually half-bloods and the few muggleborns who managed to weasel their way in, were let go, they could opt to transfer to another Metropolitan police station as their jobs in the muggle world had not been terminated.

Police Constable Fred Wilkins had not been such an Auror, but before he left London and headed out to a small department in the country for a change of scenery he had a partner who was. Prior to his move to the countryside, Fred Wilkins had served with the Metropolitan police throughout the Seventies and the early Eighties, and had briefly been partnered with a rookie named James Potter who had incidentally never completed his Auror training and therefore had never officially held a job in the Wizarding World in the end of 1979. In 1983, he received his last partner before his transfer a year later, and it had been this partner who had been a laid off Auror. Upon hearing that he had been briefly partnered with James Potter, his new partner had given him a muggle friendly account of James Potter's fate.

When he was called out to the residence of one Majorie Dursley because of a "Domestic disturbance", which was a first as when he usually came around to her place it was because the neighbors had complained about her dogs, he didn't know what to expect, since as far as he knew the rather unpleasant woman wasn't married and didn't have a boyfriend. He did not expect however to find the woman ordering him to arrest a massive blond boy that looked a bit like her while a rather familiar looking dark haired boy cradling a bulldog pup was being seen to by paramedics. While he was taking Marge's statement, he learned much to his surprise that the boy was the son of the young James Potter whom he'd briefly been partnered with back in London, and that someone had been feeding Marge a pack of lies about the man. The woman was extremely surprised when he told her the truth (which was actually the truth as he knew it, which was: After James Potter had transferred away from London himself, he became involved in an investigation into a serial killer who threatened his family, who he sent into hiding in Wales for their safety. On Halloween 1981, the serial killer attacked, and James was killed while defending his wife, and his wife was killed shortly after. One of the two had fatally wounded their attacker, because he bled out before he could kill the son).

After listening to Constable Wilkins' story she said one word, spitting it out as if it were a curse: "Petunia."

The day that Marge had learned that it actually was Petunia who was the bad seed of her family rather than her sister, had started out normally enough, or as normal as her new routine had become. Harry, who now that he was being fed regularly wasn't looking nearly as weedy, though the awful squint he had that made him look mean was still yet to be corrected, had gotten up and made the bed he had made on the couch which she was tempted to give to Dudley instead. Dudley, who was learning what it was like to be on the receiving end of the no meals until...punishment and had lost a bit of weight, had tromped downstairs without making his bed and cleaning his room, and been sent back up to do so before breakfast.

After Breakfast, Harry did his chores as quickly as he could without cutting corners so he could watch a bit of television and maybe play with the puppies later. Dudley had once again flat out refused to do anything around the house and was learning what the inside of a broom closet looked like, though it was a tight fit, and Marge went out to feed the dogs.

The morning became afternoon, and Dudley went out to cause trouble. Today, instead of running off to break the windows in a vacant house half a mile away like he had taken to doing recently, he ended up doing the one thing Marge would neither condone nor forgive. Dudley had only gotten away with kicking Ripper because Ripper could and did mete out his own punishment. Today however, Dudley had decided to attack the puppies that Harry had taken outside the kennel so they could play in the sun, which Marge allowed Harry to do because there were a couple of families looking to buy, and they would want a dog that got along with children. Dudley's first target was a rather pudgy puppy that Harry had started calling Roly-Poly. Harry, having had the saving people thing practically since he was born, jumped between Dudley and the puppy before he could land a blow, becoming Dudley's second target. Dudley kicked him, hard.

It was fortunate that Marge had been looking out her kitchen window to see what Dudley was up to, as he was still in the yard at the time this was taking place. Coming to a decision, she dialed 999 before running out the door. She wasn't going to have a puppy kicking hooligan in her home a minute longer than she had to. The fact that he was family made it much worse. Her formerly precious nephew had just proven himself beyond rotten to the core, and she wasn't entirely certain he was redeemable. She raced over to where Harry was protecting one of her most valuable puppies with his life, and pulled Dudley away.

The ambulance had arrived first, about two minutes before Constable Wilkins. The Paramedics informed her that Harry had two cracked ribs and would need to be taken to the hospital. She decided that she would of course follow as soon as the hooligan she had once considered family was off her property. She would be having words with Vernon about this as soon as he was feeling better.

It had been while she had been giving her statement to the police that she had learned some interesting facts about Harry's father who, rather being the drunken wastrel Vernon and Petunia had claimed him to be, had been a good man who had died in the line of duty. After she had listened to the story the Constable who kept citing her for no reason told her, she started wondering why her brother had lied to her. The Constable had no reason to lie about something that was so easily confirmed as he had given her James Potter's badge number (which she later confirmed with the Metropolitan Police, James Potter born May 27, 1960 died October 31, 1981 Survived by one son named Harry was listed as killed in the line of duty during an undercover assignment). Her brother had never lied to her before about anything big like this. When they were children he had of course told her a bunch of stupid stories that she could easily tell were lies, but he hadn't sat there and outright told her a bold faced lie about anything important before.

The answer came to her in a flash. There was only one person who would benefit from those lies, one person who had her sympathy for years because she had to take care of the son of a pair of drunks, one person whom she had disliked since the day Vernon had brought her for a visit and all the dogs started growling. The reason her brother had lied to her had been because of the woman who was only good for using her overlong neck for spying on the neighbors, spoiling Vernon's son until he was beyond rotten to the core, and turning her poor brother into a liar.

"Petunia." she spat.

**Edited 7/22/12**


	5. Petunia the Abuser

After she was done speaking to the constable who had answered her call, and had confirmed that her first impression of Petunia had been the correct one, and a rather aggressive Dudley Dursley had been driven away in the police car, Marge made her way down to the local hospital where little Harry was being seen to. After waiting a while for Harry's x-rays and examination to be done, the doctor, who was a proper English fellow, not one of those foreigners who didn't know to stay in their own country, called her into the examination room for a discussion since she was Harry's current guardian. There was a police constable with him when she entered the room.

After she got herself settled into a seat near the exam table upon which Harry was seated, she sat in stunned silence as she listened to everything the doctor had to say. Rather than being small and frail because he had some genetic condition she couldn't ever remember or even pronounce, Harry was small and frail because he had been badly abused. While the boy was in her brother's care, he had been starved, and had suffered a number of injuries which had gone untreated. The police constable that had been called in had to call her name several times to get her attention when the doctor was finished speaking. This was all Petunia's fault, it had to be. Vernon would never break a boy's arm and leave it untreated. Vernon would never starve a child to the point the poor malnourished boy had been. Vernon was a good man, and would never neglect a child that badly. Petunia had to be responsible for this somehow.

Of course...

Petunia had been twisting Vernon in knots until he didn't know which way was up for years. Vernon, who believed the best of his wife couldn't see it. Vernon had been convinced by Petunia that Harry was a juvenile delinquent who wouldn't know the truth if it bit him in the butt. He was away from home so often that he would really have only her word on the boys' behavior to go by because he didn't see Harry all that much outside evenings and weekends, and most of the time he saw the boy, the kid was doing chores and little else.

If Harry had some sort of accident that Vernon hadn't witnessed, and then turned to Vernon and said his arm hurt really bad, Petunia would just have to say he was lying and Vernon would believe her and punish him for lying instead of taking him to the hospital. Vernon would only deny the child meals for so long because he believed that Petunia had been feeding Harry behind his back as their mother had done when they were children, giving them plain sandwiches and water to remind them that they were being punished. Harry himself had risked punishment by giving his ungrateful cousin food when he thought she wasn't looking. Petunia obviously hadn't been feeding the boy as she was supposed to, and Vernon had been completely unaware of this because he didn't believe that his wife could be that cruel.

Marge was quite inclined to believe Harry's story of finding garbage in his lunch bag almost every day while he was at school, either because Petunia had only been pretending she was packing food for the child, or because Dudley had been eating the boy's lunch at her urging, as the rather small and bony evidence was staring her in the face. The boy, even though he had improved a bit under her care, was far too small to be healthy, and from what the doctor was telling her, he was extremely malnourished and had suffered damage that could have a number of long-term effects even if immediate countermeasures were taken.

Turning to the constable who was asking her questions about her knowledge of the boy's treatment, she made a decision. She would remain loyal to her family, and Petunia wasn't family. She wondered why she had ever considered that lying, backstabbing weasel who would cheerfully smile to her face and poison Ripper behind her back family. The dogs had never liked her, she had ruined Vernon's son, and she had made Vernon look like a child abusing monster. Starting with the first lies Petunia had told her to gain her sympathy, she told the constable everything about one Petunia Evans who never should have become a Dursley.

Harry, grateful he finally had someone on his side that was willing to believe him, backed her up. After all, Marge had fed him lots of food and had stopped punishing him for things he didn't do and Uncle Vernon had hit him only once that he could remember. Aunt Petunia had always been mean. The time he'd been whacked over the head with the frying pan? Aunt Petunia. Every slap to the face he had received as far back as he could remember? Aunt Petunia. Uncle Vernon just yelled at him, made threats, and gave him a bunch of chores he could never complete in time because Aunt Petunia had given him more while Uncle Vernon was at work, and made him finish those first.

If the doctor and the constable were really telling the truth, and that he wouldn't have to go back home to Uncle Vernon, Aunt Petunia, and Dudley, he would happily tell them every last mean thing that Aunt Petunia had said and done. He was starting to like Aunt Marge now that he had gotten to know her away from home where his aunt and uncle had been feeding her lies for years. Aside from Ripper who needed constant watching, her other dogs were nice. Colonel Fubster had also been nice to him when he had visited. The only bad part of his stay with Aunt Marge had been Dudley, and the police had taken him away. Hopefully, when this was all over, he would be allowed to stay with Aunt Marge.

The police constable who had been called into the hospital, one Kingsley Shaklebolt, shook his head as he reviewed his notes. This Marge Dursley woman seemed rather ill equipped to repair the years of damage that had been done by a spiteful woman who had borne a tremendous grudge against her famous sister, much less handle the poor abused boy that woman had left behind when she had gone to the hospital after she and her husband had gotten into an automobile accident. While it was obvious that the rather large and unattractive woman cared for Harry Potter, it was clear to him that she didn't know how to take care of damaged children, especially damaged children of a magical nature. He had also gathered from the interview that Harry's cousin had been damaged in another way entirely, and would need looking after as well, looking after that Marge Dursley was unfortunately unable to provide.

If the Dursleys hadn't gotten into that accident, who knew how long Harry's treatment would have continued to go undiscovered. Harry's aunt's sister-in-law had believed the lies she and her husband had been feeding her for years, and as a result, hadn't known that Harry would need extra care when he arrived. According to the Dursley woman, her brother's wife had been feeding the same lies to the neighborhood in which the Dursleys had lived, causing Harry's obvious abuse to go unreported as a result. Like Marge Dursley had originally done, the residents of Little Whinging believed Harry to be a lying, thieving brat who destroys anything and everything he gets his hands on. Dudley's behavior and his vandalism of the neighborhood, which Harry was often framed for, didn't help Harry's case, since if a family has one delinquent, it was sure to have more.

He would have to report this to someone in the Ministry, the higher up, the better, considering who the victim was, and how the press would have a field day if they got wind of it from some nosy clerk. He would have to bring this to Dumbledore. Due to certain irregularities with pardons after the war, he wasn't entirely certain that he could trust Minister Bagnold. If he reported this to Crouch who was on his way out of the DMLE, the power-hungry jerk would more than likely try to use it to his advantage and end up making a rather traumatized child's life much worse.

**Edited 7/22/12**


	6. The Not so Evil Dumbledore

If the truth could be told, Albus Dumbledore was an extremely overworked man, and today was no exception, as was any other day over the last forty years or so. Running Hogwarts, meeting with the Wizengamut and the International Confederation of Wizards several times a year, and dealing with the ridiculous demands of the school's Board of Governors took all of the time he had and some he could not afford to give even with the liberal use of a time-turner. Delegating non-essential tasks onto the shoulders of some of his subordinates had alleviated the pressure somewhat, but led to the great misunderstanding that had left Harry in the Dursley's care past the point of no return, the point at which all potential guardians mentioned in the Potters' wills had either died or became unable to raise the boy for various reasons.

The events that led to Harry Potter being in the situation he was in had been something of a comedy of errors. One chronically overworked Albus Dumbledore whose time was eaten up by his duties as Headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Chief Warlock of the Wizengamut, and Supreme Mugwump of the International Confederation of Wizards, when he wasn't stuck listening to the ridiculous and not so ridiculous demands of the Hogwarts Board of Governors had turned over all of Arabella Figg's reports to one Minerva McGonagall who had been concerned over Harry's welfare, and therefore would be the best to see to it. It had been the delegation of that one all-important task that led to Harry's current situation.

During what was later called the First Voldemort War which took place during the Seventies, Albus Dumbledore had left half-bloods and the children of muggleborn couples with their muggle relatives. Until Harry Potter, all of the children had been accepted by their families without exception. When he had seen how willing the Dursleys were to spoil their son Dudley, Albus had taken it as a good sign. Even if they didn't favor him as they did Dudley, he should be well cared for and at the very least have his needs met during the ten long years that he would be away from the magical world where he truly belonged.

When Arabella Figg's first report came in during the January of 1982, Dumbledore had a great deal of unfinished paperwork piled on his desk that needed to be seen to yesterday. Figuring that Minerva would tell him if something was wrong considering how concerned over the boy's welfare she had been, he sent the report down to her office unread. When Professor McGonagal never came to him with any complaints, he figured that all was well, and continued sending Mrs. Figg's reports down to Minerva's office without ever looking at them. As the point of no-return passed, Dumbledore continued to believe all was well in the Dursley residence.

Professor McGonagal however, was suffering a crisis of conscience, and had been for the last seven years. She had made herself believe that Dumbledore knew exactly what he was doing when he left Harry with the Dursleys, and that he had a plan that she wasn't privy to couldn't entirely understand based on the clues she'd been given in mind, a plan which would ensure the safety of the entire wizarding world. After all, what else would have to be at stake to cause the Headmaster to allow the Potter boy to be treated so cruelly? Dumbledore had a tendency to hold his cards so close to the vest that neither allies nor enemies could get a peek at his hand, and had manipulated situations so they worked out in his favor before, but never to quite this degree, and never with such a young and unknowing sacrifice involved.

Minerva's heart broke a little more each time she read one of Arabella Figg's increasingly frantic reports. Though she longed to confront Dumbledore about his actions, she refrained from doing so since he was clearly strengthening Harry so he would be able to survive when Voldemort returned and war broke out once more. She didn't know how she would be able to face the boy when he started attending school though.

If the Dursleys hadn't had an accident that resulted in Harry being sent to stay with Marge while they were hospitalized, and Kingsley Shaklebolt had not shown up to take the abuse report, the situation would have continued for several more years without change. Dumbledore would have been completely oblivious to what was going on until he had actually interacted with the boy, by which point it would have been too late to move him somewhere without sparking a massive custody war that most likely would not have ended in the child's favor (which would happen now irregardless since the point of no-return had been passed), Professor McGonagal would never have confronted him over the situation - having made herself believe that everything will work out in the end - and Harry would have continued to suffer under the care of Petunia and Vernon Dursley.

Kingsley came however, and after Dumbledore learned of his mistake and went through the roof, things began to change. A Dumbledore who was determined to make it up to the child for his mistake any way he could shoved all of his other business aside, and started looking into a way to move Harry to somewhere safe without sparking the custody war to end all custody wars. If such a thing happened, it would undoubtedly not end in Harry's favor, as the people with the gold necessary to grease the right palms in order to gain custody of the Boy-Who-Lived would not have his best interests in mind.

It was fortunate in a way that things had happened the way they had. Thanks to the official abuse report and investigation, Dumbledore was able to legally remove both children from the custody of Vernon and Petunia Dursley. It took a while for his representatives in the muggle world to remove Harry from Marge's home though as she had grown rather attached to the boy in the short time he had been there. It took a long discussion about the realities of the care needed for an abused child with special abilities, and a written agreement for visitation any time she requested it before she finally relented. With Dudley Dursley in hand, Dumbledore would be able to set new blood wards wherever Harry ended up living. Fortunately, Harry wouldn't need Dudley around for more than one month out of the year, which meant that the other boy couldn't constantly harass Harry like he had previously been doing at his parents' urging.

He sure as hell was going to pay a great deal more attention to Harry's living situation in the future, and if there was ever another sign that Harry was being mistreated, the person who had dared harm the child would regret ever having been born. Because of his negligence, a particularly vulnerable child had suffered, and because that child had suffered, he could have potentially lost the next war with Voldemort before it even began, and may have ended up with yet another war down the line as another hurt boy decided to lash out against those he perceived as having wronged him.

What child would be willing to fight to save a world that had done nothing for him, or worse, a world that had actively harmed him?

**Edited 7/22/12**


	7. Fubster Joins the Game

Marge Dursley sighed as she washed the dishes in a kitchen that was only occupied by her. The house was much too quiet. Harry wasn't in the living-room watching t.v. or outside playing with the puppies. Dudley wasn't throwing some fit somewhere, and there were no angry neighbors dragging him back from wherever he ran off to instead of doing the chores assigned to him like he was supposed to. Both Harry and Dudley were gone now, and things were back to the way they were before they arrived only a few short weeks before. It was amazing how short a time it took for a person to get used to total chaos.

Colonel Fubster was staying in the guest room that had belonged to Dudley for nearly a month while Harry had kept the couch in the storage room "because he didn't want to be a bother". He had come when she had called him - crying for the first time in years - and told him how Petunia had ruined Vernon's son, starved her own nephew half to death, and blamed Vernon for everything when the police began an investigation after the doctor at the hospital had reported his findings. The only reason Vernon wasn't in prison at the moment was because it was going to take a few more weeks for him to recover enough to be able to leave the hospital, as it was, he was handcuffed to the bed, and there was a constable guarding him at all times.

Colonel Fubster had listened sympathetically as she told him the things Vernon had told her when she visited him when he called her after the police had interviewed him, and the things she had heard when the people who took Harry away had interviewed him in the living-room. Apparently, due to a quirk in genetics, Harry had been born with special Psychokinetic abilities that some rather lazy and primitive minded people who didn't want to dig any further had simply labeled "Magic", and he had been the sole survivor of an attack on his family home by the leader of a group of terrorists who also possessed these abilities. Petunia, who had been entrusted with Harry's care in good faith, had decided to make the child's life a living hell out of hatred and jealousy of her sister. Vernon hadn't entirely been aware of this, only knowing that Petunia had disliked the boy and had only rather reluctantly taken him in.

Vernon had punished the boy every time he had been accused of something, because he had been unaware of the boy's limits, having bought into the whole magic thing and believing the boy capable of anything and everything under the sun, and had believed that he was guilty of everything he was accused of. Vernon had not however been aware of the fact that the instant his back was turned, such as when he left for work or for something else that took most of the day, Petunia would add to the punishments he had given Harry by adding housework she didn't want to deal with and more to the chore list so when he came home and found that the shed wasn't painted or the lawn wasn't mowed, he added another punishment. It had been a rather vicious cycle which upset Vernon because he believed that the boy refused to mind him, and he took it out on the boy by yelling and adding more punishments which caused the boy to become stressed and start "doing magic" which further upset Vernon who punished the boy even more, hating himself for punishing the boy, and hating the boy for making him punish him.

Dudley - who Petunia had trained to get Harry in trouble any way he could from sabotaging his completed chores to provoking fights so he could get in trouble for breaking his glasses or "attacking his poor innocent cousin" - became Vernon's perfect little boy who could do no wrong. Vernon lavished the child with gifts at almost every opportunity. Believing that it had been Harry who had been breaking all of Dudley's nice things, Vernon bought him even more extravagant gifts to replace the items Dudley had rather carelessly broke. He never realized that in doing he was helping Petunia ruin the boy who had no idea of the value of a Pound or the value of Hard Work, and had never seen that Dudley had completely gotten out of control from being allowed to run wild without discipline as Petunia had explained away all of his misbehavior, usually in ways that put the blame on Harry.

When the police had come to Privet Drive to inspect the home, the neighbors who rather disliked Petunia and were rather gleeful that the local scandal involved her for once had told them of the number of times they had heard Vernon yelling at Harry whom they had heard was the disturbed son of a couple of mentally ill drunks who had offed themselves by driving into a tree at 100mph, and how they had seen a rather purple-faced Vernon Dursley drag the small boy into the house on more than one occasion. An inspection of the interior of the house revealed that despite the fact that there were four bedrooms - one of which was filled with broken and unwanted toys and books that covered every surface, including some rather battered furniture that had been placed in there as if it had been intended to be used at some point - Harry had been forced to sleep in a cupboard under the stairs. The boy's only clothes were cast-offs from his much larger cousin, which had been a suggestion of Petunia's Vernon followed as there was no point in wasting good money on clothes the boy was just going to ruin, and the only toys he had to play with were a set of broken tin soldiers which had been one of the few good gifts Vernon ever gave him for Christmas, never knowing why he had given his favorite childhood toys to the "Freak" rather than passing them down to Dudley, and not quite able to bring himself to take them back for some strange reason. All of this naturally set the focus of their investigation on one Vernon Dursley. Due to the fact that Petunia Dursley lied her ass off when the police had interviewed her, she had been seen as a rather unwilling accomplice.

When Marge had stopped speaking, Colonel Fubster shook his head, sighed sadly, and said that he knew that Vernon should have married the Wilkerson girl. He'd known that something was up when he'd seen that small boy in the too big clothes and wrong glasses. He had thought that either Vernon was having money troubles and was too proud to admit it, even to an old family friend, or that he and his wife were rather poorly disguising the boy so he wouldn't be constantly mobbed the second he set foot off of Privet drive. He hadn't realized that what was really going on could be this serious. He would have to get back in touch with all of the fellow squibs he had contact with, maybe one of them would be able to help in this situation. It wasn't just about the well being of William Dursley's children this time, that wife of Vernon's had hurt the Boy-Who-Lived. The boy who had saved his family by defeating Voldemort when he was but a baby.

Meanwhile, many miles away in the Headmaster's office at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, the usual paperwork that preceded the start of a new school year was piling up on a rather crowded desk and going completely ignored as one Albus Dumbledore frantically pored over several documents and genealogical charts, trying to find a solution to a very serious problem. Where could he place the Boy-Who-Lived without sparking the custody war to end all custody wars?

Downstairs in his own office near the Dungeons, one Argus Filch read the letter that arrived a half-hour ago for a second time. It seemed that Fubster needed help dealing with a tart who had ruined the life of the son of a friend of his as well as that of the Boy-Who-Lived who was currently staying in the otherwise empty Gryffindor dorms. He remembered Lily Evans. She didn't make as many messes as the other students, and didn't pick on him. If he didn't know that James Potter could make an incredible mess trying to make a swelling solution, he would've sworn that he had used Amortentia to snag her. Putting quill to parchment, he began to compose his reply. He was in, and he thought his sister Arabella Figg nee Filch might be in as well if Fubster cared to ask.

**Edited 7/22/12**


	8. Interlude:Vernon Begins to Think

Vernon Dursley had been left with a great deal to think about after Marge had left. And, since he was stuck in a hospital bed without a television to distract him because a vindictive nurse had unplugged it, about all he could do was think. That, and read the books on paranormal phenomena that Marge had left for him to study. His sister believed that his nephew was just Psychokinetic, and that the whole magic thing was complete hogwash. While reading one of the more serious books on the subject, he learned that the term Psychokinesis was an umbrella term for a wide variety of talents which included Telekinesis (moving objects with one's mind), Pyrokinesis (setting fires with one's mind), Cryokinesis (freezing things with one's mind), Self Levitation, Telepathy (mind reading), Object Deformation (spoon-bending), Teleportation (the thing wizards called Apparating), Transmutation of matter (transfiguration), Shape-shifting, Control of Magnetism, and Control of light. Basically everything that fell under the category of Psychokinesis was everything he had considered magic to be.

Rather than trying to find a scientific explanation for what Petunia's sister and her ilk were like his father had taught him to do, he had been taken in by the "Magic wands" and other fairy-tale trappings of the so-called Wizarding World and forgotten the most important lesson his father had ever taught him. There was a rational and scientific explanation for everything, including so called "Magic". The answer to what the boy and his parents' family were would have been staring him in the face if he had bothered to look for it. Actually, it had been staring him in the face without him putting two and two together, considering all of the horror films and Sci-fi shows he had watched when Petunia wasn't about to sniff disapprovingly.

Due to some odd genetic quirk, the boy was able to use parts of his brain that most humans couldn't, nothing more. He was capable of many things most of the human race wasn't able to do, but he wasn't all powerful, and he couldn't curse anyone with bad luck or control the weather as Petunia had claimed. Basically, all the boy could do until he went to that school of his and learned to control his abilities was move a few things about, shrink sweaters, grow his hair out far more quickly than normal, give people who startled and/or frightened him minor burns, and shift himself a few feet without moving through the intervening space.

Sure, these things were alarming, but they had all been mostly harmless. They could've gotten dangerous in the future, and could've been dangerous at certain points, but actually hadn't been.

Marge had seen "Magic" in its purest form without any of the trappings such as wands and incantations that he had been introduced to when he had first met the boy's parents and had a particularly nasty prank pulled on him. She didn't actually know what was happening at the time, but instead of withdrawing and declaring it unnatural as he had when he had first been introduced to magic, she did as their father would have done and went down to the library to do research until she discovered a sound and rational explanation for what she had seen. She had found the correct answer almost immediately, and with some careful questioning and testing, she had later determined that the boy had actually been unaware of his powers, contrary to what Petunia had been telling him for years.

Through her research, his sister had also discovered that he hadn't been raising the boy properly, considering his special circumstances.

He had followed Petunia's suggestions in far too many things when it came to raising the boy as she had a sister with the same "Magical" powers and therefore knew best. Being fearful of the "Unnatural" occurrences in his home, he was almost happy to punish the boy if it would make it all stop. Believing the boy did magic to spite him, he had punished the boy even more after each incident, heedless of the possible consequences. And, there had been consequences, the loss of his job and the constable sitting outside his door so he didn't try to escape were two of them.

Marge had discovered through her reading books that most considered crackpot because of the subjects they discussed, subjects that he could attest were actually true as the proof had been living under his roof for several years, that incidents of a less than normal nature would be more frequent when the boy was under an unusual amount of stress. Looking back on it, he could see that it was true. The incidents had after all started when the boy had used "magic" to take Dudley's second bottle before he was finished with it back in the beginning when Petunia would make two bottles for Dudley and give Harry the leftovers from the second bottle, and in light of the discovery that Petunia had been starving the boy, he could now see how it could be an act of desperation rather than the greed he had thought it was at the time. If he had kept the child calm over the following years, the incidents would most likely have been few and far between if any.

Looking back on the time he'd had the boy under his roof, he realized that he had done the boy a great deal of wrong. If he had actually bothered to do some research instead of falling for that whole "Magic" thing and believing the boy to be completely unnatural, he probably would have known to keep the child calm, as that was what had stopped most of the incidents caused by children in the more serious accounts in the books Marge had left him.

Come to think of it, most of the accounts of strange happenings around children stopped around the time they turned eleven or so. That, or around the time their siblings turned eleven, which was the age at which the schools started picking them up and started brainwashing them into thinking they were witches and wizards.

It had only been through good fortune that the boy hadn't discovered his abilities and either turned into a human version of Trelane or another Gary Mitchell considering the number of times he had been forced to use them for his own safety and well-being. He could easily see how that could have happened, should something like that have come to pass, especially since instead of instilling positive feelings towards them like they should have been from the start, they had done just about everything in their power to make the boy hate them and see them as the enemy.

If the child decided to come back for revenge he wouldn't entirely blame him, he would have done the same if the same thing happened to him as a child.

&!&!&!&!&!&

Author's note: I took the information on Psychokinesis in the first paragraph from the Wikipedia article on Psychokinesis under the section labeled Umbrella term. Trelane and Gary Mitchell are from Star Trek the Original Series. Trelane was a super-powered child who trapped and tormented several members of the Enterprise crew and was about to kill Kirk when his parents intervened. Gary Mitchell was a member of the Enterprise crew and friend to Captain Kirk who gained extraordinary powers during some accident with a galactic barrier and grew drunk on them killing people at will and declaring himself a god.

**Edited 8-25-12**


	9. Rita's Surprise

Dumbledore settled back in his chair and sighed. He had found a possible solution to the problem of Harry's placement. It would be a tough sell though considering the fact that Harry's treatment at the hands of his relatives had begun to leak to the press. That, and he wasn't a hundred percent certain that the person he had in mind to take the boy and later his cousin, once the spoiled child had been sufficiently rehabilitated, would cooperate.

Asking a spinster with very little experience caring for small children to become the guardian of two children with special needs could very well prove too much, especially considering the fact that one of the aforementioned children had already worn out his welcome in her home. Wherever young Harry - who would need a great deal of counseling to recover from the abuse he'd received from his Aunt and Uncle - went, so too would the possibly irredeemably spoiled Dudley Dursley follow, for Harry Potter was only safe in a place where his mother's blood dwelled. With Petunia out of the picture for the foreseeable future, that only left Dudley to recharge the special protection that Lily had given her son.

Hoping that he wasn't making another serious mistake, Albus Dumbledore set out for the residence of one Marge Dursley.

&!&!&!&!&!&

Ralph Davies studied the piece of paper in his hand. His Squib brother had written it up in about five minutes at his kitchen table the night before. Knowing he was risking his career doing this, the typesetter of the Daily Prophet replaced Rita Skeeter's usual daily drivel with his brother's article. Instead of an article on the brutality of Muggles in general and one Muggle in particular, that morning's readers got a completely different surprise...

Rita Skeeter always liked to review her work over breakfast, which was the time of day when most of the world was seeing it for the first time. After paying the Post-Owl who delivered her copy of the Daily Prophet, she buttered her toast, picked up her paper in her left hand and her cup of tea in her right, took a sip of the tea, and promptly sprayed the front page of her paper. Under her byline was an article she had never seen before, an article that surprised her just as much as it did the rest of Wizarding Britain.

**LILY POTTER'S JEALOUS SISTER MAKES BOY-WHO-LIVED'S LIFE A LIVING HELL b**lared the headline. Underneath the headline was an article that she would have been proud to claim, had she actually written it. It was a pity she hadn't written it herself though. Come to think of it, nobody would need to know she hadn't since it was her name on the byline.

_Everyone along Privet Drive who heard Vernon Dursley's yelling would assume that it had been him that had been hitting the Boy-Who-Lived_ the article began.

_Further investigation proves that their assumptions would be wrong. The name that Vernon Dursley could be heard calling the child the most over the years actually turned out to be quite revealing. Almost every evening, Vernon Dursley could be heard by neighbors up and down the street calling Harry Potter a "Freak". While this is rather shocking, and seems to reveal the Muggles' opinion of our world, an interview with Severus Snape 28 who had been a childhood friend of Lily Potter nee Evans reveals the true source of this particular epithet._

_"After Lily was accepted to Hogwarts, her sister Petunia wrote to Headmaster Dumbledore hoping to be accepted as well. Since she possessed no magical abilities, she was denied. She grew jealous of her sister because of this, and started refering to her as "The Freak" soon afterwards" Snape said._

_Why would it be Vernon who called the child "Freak" rather than Petunia if that were the case, considering the fact that both Evans sisters were long grown by the time Vernon had met them? The truth is, Vernon picked this particular habit up from his wife who was generally much quieter about it. It is Petunia's more silent nature that had allowed her to practically get away with murder while the world focused its eyes on her louder husband who seemed more the type than she._

_Vernon Dursley had married Petunia Evans believing that she was an honest and forthright person. If she said something was true, he believed it to be so. When Petunia told him something about the Magical world that he had almost no interaction with, he believed her. So, when Petunia told her husband that Harry Potter had misbehaved, he would believe her and punish Harry accordingly. His punishments usually consisted of chores, missed meals, and yelling at the boy as the one time he had actually hit the boy with a belt had made him physically ill afterwards._

_What Vernon didn't know was that Petunia's insane jealousy of her sister had carried over to her nephew who was powerless to defend himself from her. Out of that jealousy, Petunia exercised the power she had over her husband who had very limited knowledge of the Wizarding world every chance she got, lying to Vernon so he would give Harry extra punishments, and hitting the child while her husband was at work, and therefore couldn't see what was going on under his roof._

_As soon as her son Dudley became old enough, she trained the boy to sabotage Harry's chores, blame Harry for any misdeed that Dudley himself had done, and to beat Harry up in order to cover the bruises his mother had made._

_While Vernon was giving what he thought were reasonable punishments to a child he had been led to believe was capable of doing everything from stealing that night's dessert to making it rain during the one trip to the seaside he'd get that year, Petunia was in the background adding chores to a list that was already too much for a child to handle, sabotaging or having her son sabotage Harry's progress on said chores, starving Harry or giving him food that was only just barely fit for human consumption, or hitting the boy as on the memorable occasion when she broke Harry's arm and convinced her husband that the child had been lying about being hurt._

_The sad truth of the matter is that mistreatment of the Boy-Who-Lived hadn't been by muggles who hated magic as I and many others had been led to believe, but by a jealous and spiteful woman who was unwittingly abetted by an ignorant man who wanted to believe the best of his wife to the point that he was unable to see or refused to see what was right under his nose. Who knows what condition the Boy-Who-Lived would have been if this had continued much longer._

_It was quite fortunate that a timely accident brought these horrors to light before the Boy-Who-Lived was lost to us forever through the actions of his jealous aunt, and her unwitting accomplice whose only goal in life was to provide everything he could for his family._

Rita Skeeter smiled as the first owls congratulating her for writing such a ground-breaking article poured in. The smile was slightly brittle though, as being congratulated for something she hadn't done left a sour taste in her mouth. The sense of elation she had gotten when the first ten owls arrived bearing something other than howlers soon turned to ash. She wasn't happy, and because she wasn't happy, somebody would have to pay. Targeting a helpless child who wasn't even school aged was even too tastrless for her, Vernon Dursley appeared to be a brainless chump and a dead end after this article which absolved him of most of his guilt.

Everyone seemed to want to hear more about the monster Petunia.

Since all of her readers wanted to hear about Petunia, that's just what they'd get. If someone could write something this good with just a minimal amount of research, who knows what would turn up if one dug a little deeper.

If the Wizarding World wanted their monster, they'd get their monster, and Petunia may as well be the one to pay for her unhappiness as anybody.

**Edited 8-25-12**


	10. Dudley, Puppies, and Attic Diving

Hagrid stared down at the letter Dumbledore had sent him. It would seem that in addition to his duties this year, he was to tame a creature that most of the experts who examined it had deemed to be untamable. He had done something along those lines several times before, but never with a creature quite like this one. The creature in question this time was an eight year-old boy that had been allowed to run wild, and as a result had become more animal than child despite the fact that he had been raised in civilization.

Aside from occasional visits from the students, he hadn't really dealt with children before. He'd never had any younger siblings, and he hadn't had any children of his own that he knew of. Taming a child and turning him into a productive member of society would be a new and challenging experience for him.

Knowing he had his work cut out for him, Hagrid headed down to Hogsmeade to pick up one Dudley Dursley.

&!&!&!&!&

When Harry returned, Marge Dursley had been happy to have him back. Both she and the puppies had missed him while he was gone. She wasn't quite certain about the man that Dumbledore had sent to help her care for Harry though. He looked as if he had some sort of disease, and he frightened the dogs who shied around him with their tails between their legs, to scared to even think about growling or barking at him. He was willing to help make repairs around the house that she left since she was in no shape to go climbing up ladders or crawling under sinks though, which was a plus in her book.

The man that dropped by every evening to check on Harry's well-being seemed to be of a rather unsavory sort as well, but the dogs weren't frightened of him as they were of the other man, despite the fact that he dressed all in black like some punk teenager. Being in his late twenties, he was far too old to be dressed like that.

Harry had gone back to helping out in the kennels and playing with the puppies less than a day after his arrival. The family that had bought the puppy Harry had dubbed Roly-Poly had been quite happy with their purchase and had told their friends about her. Marge now had more families looking at the dogs than she usually did at this time of year. Usually, the families came looking around Christmastime and more often than not left empty handed. Not so now however, and that had all been thanks to Harry.

&!&!&!&!&

Rita Skeeter smiled as she entered the vacant home that belonged to Vernon and Petunia Dursley. The house had been guarded from entry by magical means but that was no barrier to one such as her. Learning how to pick locks like a muggle had paid off a very long time ago. The wards that surrounded the property prevented any Wizard or Witch who meant harm to Harry Potter or his family from entering the property, but since she had just come for information...Well, she was currently standing in the foyer looking at a family portrait from which the Boy-Who-Lived was absent.

The first place one should look if they wanted to find any skeletons which may be hidden in the closet in a muggle houselhold was usually the attic. Making her way upstairs she took note of about a hundred more muggle photographs from which Harry Potter was also absent.

&!&!&!&

Dumbledore watched as the intruder alert for #4 Privet Drive started flashing. Going over to the security orb he kept for such occasions, he looked in and found Rita Skeeter rooting through the Dursleys' attic. She was currently emptying out a box of old baby clothes. He considered going over there and chasing her out, but he had to catch up on the paperwork he had neglected while he was arranging Harry's placement, which subsequently piled up to the rafters in revenge for his inattention. That last article of hers couldn't have come at a better time.

It wasn't as if Skeeter would find anything groundbreaking or earth-shattering in a box of old junk anyways.

&!&!&!&!&

Hagrid sat watching the little brat who he'd had to carry screaming all the way from Hogsmeade turn his nose up at the meal that had been set before him. His work was going to be cut out for him in this case, but he was going to complete the task that Dumbledore had given him even if it killed him. One animal was pretty much like any other, and human children were no exception, as soon as you figured out what made them tick, you could get them to do just about anything as long as you either had something they wanted or something they really didn't want in hand.

"Looks like the firs' thing I'm gonna need to teach yeh is some manners. Bein' rude teh the wrong person is a good way o' gettin' yerself killed." Hagrid said. "Rejectin' someone or somethin's hospitality can be bad for yeh. I knew a guy who got his throat tore out 'cause he turned his nose up at the meal his hosts provided."

The boy apparently got the hint. The look on his face as he dug into his stew was absolutely priceless. Satisfied by his small victory, he settled back into his seat and got back to his own meal.

&!&!&!&

While Harry, Marge, and Remus were enjoying the meal that Remus prepared, Rita Skeeter hit paydirt in a box that had been carelessly thrown into the Dursleys' attic after the deaths of Lily and Petunia's parents. It wasn't just the amount of time between the marriage of the Evanses and the birth of their elder daughter Petunia that brought a smirk to her lips and a wicked gleam to her eye, but correspondence between Lily and her parents revealed a life that Petunia Dursley thought she could leave behind once she was married, a life which would now be turning around and biting the woman in the butt. The older papers from prior generations revealed some things of interest as well, but none so interesting as the Evanses marriage certificate, Petunia's birth certificate, and Lily Potter's letters. It seemed that in just one box she had found enough for an entire series of articles, and she had yet to search the other half of the boxes in the attic.

She would have to thank that mysterious article writer one day before she tore him or her a new one. If they hadn't replaced her article, she would have still been focusing on that useless muggle chump until interest petered out, when the real paydirt, at least a book's worth, came from the Evans side of the family.

**Edited 7/22/12**


	11. Two Stories a Happy School day and Punis

**PETUNIA DURSLEY NOT AN EVANS!**

screamed the morning headline on each Daily Prophet that winged its way into wizarding homes across Great Britan.

_In an effort to determine why Petunia Dursley would harm her sister's son in such a manner, I (Rita Skeeter) did a great deal of digging._

Began the article underneath.

_In my search I discovered that Petunia was only Lily Potter's half-sister. Rosmary Evans nee Allsworth (yes, as in the Allsworth line thought to have died out more than a century ago) gave birth to Petunia "Evans" on October 7, 1957. Interestingly enough, Rosmary was married to Alexander Evans on April 23, 1957 which is five and a half months earlier! Photographic evidence shows that Petunia bears absolutely no resemblance to Alexander Evans._

_It is a known fact that before muggles developed reliable tests for determining parentage (through a mysterious process that involves something called DNA) in the last year or so, women who had become pregnant after having relations with multiple men would pick the man they believed to be the child's father, or amongst the less scrupulous of these women, pick the man that is the richest, and tell them about the child. Some women picked correctly, and other's like Rosemary, who had been fortunate that the man she picked had been the honorable sort who had married her, did not._

_It is not apparent when Alexander Evans began to realize that Petunia was not his child as there is a period of time in which no pictures had been taken and pictures taken after Lily's birth showed a certain distance between Mr. Evans and the child he'd thought to be his eldest. Lily, who was born two years and some months after Petunia, looks a great deal like Mr. Evans however. Later correspondence indicates that Petunia was well aware of the fact that she wasn't Mr. Evans' child. _

_It is perhaps this that had caused her insane jealousy of her sister which in turn caused her to brutally lash out at her innocent nephew who had been far too young to defend himself._

_For more information on Muggle "Genetic" testing and its history turn to page 3._

For perhaps the first time ever, many pureblooded subscribers turned the page to read about a muggle subject out of curiosity. They then snickered at the expense of said DNA testing and the amount of time it took to get results. A wizard could get a cheap potions kit and get results in under ten minutes after the potion was brewed. Feeling superior, they either went back to their routines or prepared nasty letters to send to the horrible woman who mistreated the Boy-Who-Lived.

&!&!&!&!&!&

Dudley growled as he stomped after Hagrid who was lending him to someone called Argus Filch for the day in order to learn the value of hard work. It was apparently his punishment for knocking over Hagrid's belongings and dumping the contents of his pantry onto the floor. Work wasn't something he did, it was something the Freak did.

"If yeh knew how hard it is teh clean thin's up, yeh wouldn' be makin such a mess in the firs' place." Hagrid said as he pushed the boy out the door and led him up to the castle.

He didn't try running off because he knew Hagrid would just catch him and carry him, which was worse than walking on his own. He'd tried to escape several times before, and had failed. Though he didn't seem it, the mountain of a man was very fast and a light sleeper. He would run off after Hagrid left him with this Filch person.

"So this is Petunia's brat then?" the creepy old man who was waiting at the door of the castle said when they arrived.

"Yeah, tha's him." Hagrid said. "One of the wors' brats I've ever had the displeasure teh meet."

"I'm told he doesn't get it from his father's side of the family, Colonel Fubster informed me that when his father was that age he had excellent manners." the old man said. "Come along, and if you think you can sneak off...well the consequences of trying will be unpleasant to say the least."

&!&!&!&!&

Harry smiled as he scored a goal. He had recently been enrolled at the local primary school, and unlike his last school, he liked this one. He had been afraid of going at first, but Remus had helped him get over that fear. Unlike his old school where his Aunt told lies about him to the teachers and Dudley and his gang chased away any possible friends, the people here seemed to like him. He'd even been picked by one of the popular boys to play on his football team during recess.

The teachers didn't call him a liar or accuse him of cheating or disturbing the class when he hadn't. Since he could actually see the blackboard with his new glasses, he wasn't laughed at when he was called on to read whatever was on the board or solve a problem. Remus and Aunt Marge had even taken time to help him improve his penmanship so his writing didn't look like chicken scratch. Apparently he was left handed, Aunt Petunia had always made him use his right. Now that the teachers could actually read it, they had started praising his work.

As recess ended, Harry headed back to his classroom in a group of his new friends.

Life was good.

&!&!&!&!&

Snape scowled down at the obese boy that had run into him. Despite sharing at least some of Lily's blood, the small and exceedingly fat creature that stood before him bore absolutely no resemblance to his aunt. He'd read the reports on how the child had treated Lily's son, and while he hated Potter for being James' child, he hated the idea of something that belonged to Lily being ill treated even more. Being a child made him instantly dislike the brat in front of him, being a bully put the brat on his shit list, harming Lily's child placed him on the list of people to kill and make look like it was an accident.

"Well, well, well, what do we have here?" Snape said giving the boy the smile that had caused at least one child lose bladder control and several others to faint.

The boy just looked up at him and made a sound like a mouse that had just been stepped on.

He grabbed the boy's arm and started dragging him along the corridors towards Filch's office. The crotchety caretaker would undoubtedly be happy to see the little pest returned to him.

"If you thought you could escape your punishment, you're sorely mistaken." he said.

&!&!&!&!&

The next morning Marge glanced at the "Wizarding" newspaper that Mr. Lupin had a subscription to before handing it to him. She wasn't entirely surprised by the headline.

**Petunia Dursley A Drug Addict**

blazed the headline above Rita Skeeter's byline. Though she usually thought the wizarding paper to be crap of the same caliber of the type of supermarket tabloids that had headlines like Aliens Ate My Baby!, Marge couldn't help herself, and began to read.

_Doing further research in Petunia NotEvans Dursley, I came across this shocking fact. It would seem that during High School, Petunia had gone beyond the experimenting with Marajuana that most muggles did at that age in the 1960s and 70s and became addicted to an illegal substance called Cocaine. Cocaine is an addictive substance derived from the Coca plant which is used in many stimulant potions (some of which are illegal due to their addictive nature). By the time she reached University, she had accrued a debt with her supplier that her family was unable to pay and started dealing to pay it off. _

_In hopes of getting Petunia over her addiction, her half-sister Lily and her parents had done something called an "Intervention" during her second year of University, and she then went into something called "Rehab" where they attempt to cure people of their drug addictions. They had thought themselves successful, but were apparently mistaken. _

_Though she claimed to be "Clean" by the time she was married, it is quite possible that she was still "Using". The fact that she is unusually skinny - bordering on anorexic - while her husband and son are obese points to this fact, as does her unusual and often irrational behavior. It should also be noted that her son was born dangerously premature and underweight for a baby at that gestational age. Dudley Dursley's survival had been declared a miracle by the doctors (muggle healers) who tended to him during his stay at the hospital. There are several rumors that Lily Potter had visited young Dudley during this time despite her sister's protests._

_For more on the "Muggle Drug Culture" and a list of Illegal drugs, their potion equivalents, and symptoms of use Turn to Page 4._

_For more on "Interventions" , "Rehab", and "Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous" turn to page 17._

Marge turned to the pages indicated. The information was surprisingly accurate if somewhat dated. Across wizarding Britain, thousands of others did the same, and as a result, a number of hidden drug addictions were revealed causing both a great deal of harm and a great deal of good as said addictions were dealt with.

**Edited 7/23/12**


	12. Interlude: Petunia Looks Back

Petunia stared helplessly at the letters that poured into her room, letters that had been brought in by owls, and letters that had been brought by by an actual postman after the story of how Harry had been treated in her home had gotten out into the Muggle world as well as the Wizarding one in which the story had first broken. If she hadn't put all of the blame for Harry's condition on her husband in a moment of blind panic - fearing that her prior drug conviction would give her a longer prison sentence - she would probably be sitting in a cell right now. Many of the letters she had received in the days since the police had looked into Harry's case were what the Wizarding World had called howlers and they had screamed at her about what a horrible person she was before they had exploded. The others she didn't dare open for fear of what may be inside.

If someone hadn't sent her copies of that awful Skeeter woman's articles, she would not have known what was going on, since she had had no contact with the Wizarding world since the day Harry had been abandoned on her doorstep like a newspaper or a bottle of milk. While Skeeter had gotten some of her facts straight, she had painted them in the most horrible light possible in order to make her seem as if she were the worst person in the world, and had been born that way.

Sure, she'd hit the boy on occasion, but not as much as the first article had hinted at, and most of the time when she did so, it was a light smack to the back of the head. She hadn't been the one to break Harry's arm either. He'd done that while falling out of a tree he was supposed to be trimming. The shears had been too short to reach the branches the boy needed to cut, so he came up with the not-so-brilliant idea of climbing the tree. She'd been too afraid to take him to the hospital, since he was covered in bruises from the last fight with Dudley, and a number of awkward questions would be asked if a doctor saw those bruises, awkward questions that could get her and Vernon in trouble with the law. Seeing as some of Harry's wounds had a habit of disappearing overnight, she had decided to keep him in his cupboard and check in the morning. When he didn't appear to be in pain the next morning, she had assumed that nothing was wrong and that the injury had magically healed itself.

She didn't think she'd deliberately trained Dudley to torment Harry the way he did. It was just that he had never received any negative reinforcement to deter him from such behavior. Considering the fact that she had packed Harry a modest lunch every school day since it would look bad if she didn't, and it guaranteed him at least one meal every weekday so he didn't starve (which would also look bad) she could only come to the conclusion that someone else had been eating the lunch she'd sent off with the boy if Harry's claims that he'd only found garbage (claims she had previously believed to be lies to get extra food) were true. The culprit in this case was quite possibly Dudley who had a habit of taking anything Harry liked during the rare family meals where he actually ate.

True, she wasn't the best of aunts. Her taking her anger at Lily who had torn her family apart before the world she'd joined completely destroyed it out on her son wasn't the best idea. Adding chores she didn't want to do to an already overlong list of tasks for the boy to complete probably wasn't the best idea either now that she looked back on it. But, Vernon wasn't as innocent as the Wizards had painted him to be. While he didn't hit the boy, he had verbally abused him, locked him in a cupboard, assigned chores that were nearly impossible for a boy Harry's age, denied the boy meals, looked the other way while she punished him, and followed almost all of her suggestions for raising the boy no matter how wrong they were. Both of them had been guilty, no matter what Vernon's sister who had apparently gotten to the wizarding world with Vernon's side of things first claimed to believe.

She couldn't believe the Skeeter woman's audacity when she had dug into her personal life. Airing the fact that she wasn't her father's child by blood was a low blow. She'd known all her life that she wasn't a biological child of Alexander Evans, as the man's family had said as much when her father was out of earshot. But, the situation hadn't been as Skeeter had painted it. Her mother wasn't a slut, and the illegitemacy issue hadn't been what had made her jealous of her sister either. They had separated over the fact that Lily was magic and she wasn't, amongst other things including the fact that Lily had decided to live in that world full-time and fight in a war that wasn't her business despite the danger it would put their family in. The fact that Wizards had killed their parents didn't help.

The true story of the matter of her parentage was that her step-father had rescued her mother who had been raped and was in the process of being murdered. After being led by her parents to believe that if she got an abortion for any reason she would go to hell after enduring a horrible life as punishment for her sin, her mother had kept the pregnancy. Soon after the rescue, she married Mr. Evans who had fallen in love with her during his frequent visits to see if she was alright, and didn't want her to go through the shame of raising a child out of wedlock, especially considering the fact that it hadn't been her fault in the first place. Eventually, her mother had come to love her husband as well, and they had a child of their own which was Lily. She had heard this story only once, shortly after she had reached adulthood, and as it had never been brought up before, it was never mentioned since.

Most such stories never had as happy an ending as hers had, as most mothers who had become pregnant as a result of rape had been unable to bear looking at their children, and almost always resented them if they were forced to carry them to term. Amazingly, through some miracle, both Mr. Evans and her mother had decided to love her and care for her despite her origins, seeing her as an innocent in the matter, as it hadn't been her fault she was conceived. She hadn't made it easy for them though. She had often been willfully disobedient in her younger years, and had fallen into many bad habits as a teenager. One such habit had been Cocaine. Her Cocaine use had led to criminal activity. While many would blame this on her origins, her parents instead had wondered where they had gone wrong in raising her.

With the help of her family, she had eventually gotten clean of her cocaine addiction. The instant she was clean, she had replaced that addiction with one that was quite possibly more dangerous. While she was in the process of becoming clean, she had started to gain weight for the first time since she had been a slightly chubby teenager. This in turn had started an unhealthy obsession with her weight that had led to something the doctors had called Anorexia. When she had met Vernon in December 1978, a month after she had left rehab, she was at a normal weight for a person of her height. When she had married him in August 1979, she was so skinny that the wedding dress she wore that day had to be padded so her ribs wouldn't show. At the constant urging of her doctors, she gained a little weight while she was pregnant with Dudley, but apparently not enough as her eating habits had led to complications with the pregnancy that had resulted in her son being dangerously premature. While she hated to admit it, if it hadn't been for Lily and her magic, Dudley would have died.

Her treatment of Harry hadn't been the result of drugs as Skeeter had claimed in her inflammatory article. It had been because she had transferred her jealousy of Lily's magic, and her anger over Lily's role in their parents' deaths to the boy. When she saw Harry, she didn't see a boy, she saw all of her shattered dreams and the lifeless faces of her parents as they had been in their coffins. She wanted him to feel at least some of the pain she felt each time she looked at him and saw what wasn't there. Looking at the letters that had begun to pile up beside her bed, she started to realize that she was beginning to reap what she had sown in regards to the boy.

&!&!&!&!&

Author's Note: For those who are saying that I'm over vilifying Petunia, most of the story where that was done is from the point of view of those who knew and loved Vernon and couldn't believe he would ever knowingly participate in child abuse or spoil his son to the point that he was nearly irredeemable and pushed all of the blame on Petunia who herself was rather guilty for many things including physically abusing Harry. As for most of the rest, ie the articles, that's mostly Rita Skeeter being herself, taking a few facts and bending them way out of shape.

**Edited 8/24/12**


	13. Arraignments

Vernon looked up at the judge. He'd gotten out of the hospital recently, and would need extensive physical therapy to be able to walk again. He and his wife were both lucky to be alive right now, and he had a strong suspicion that the only reason that Harry and Dudley had survived the car crash they'd been in months earlier almost completely unscathed had been because of Harry's "Magic", as Petunia was in nearly the same condition as he was, and had also required a lengthy hospital stay.

As soon as he had been released, he had been brought to the local jail and held until his arraignment. As he heard the charges against him read, he knew that he would plead guilty because there was nothing else he could do. He was indeed guilty of what he was being accused of after all. He had treated a member of his family in a most deplorable manner that would have had his parents and grandparents hanging their heads in shame had they lived to see this moment. Through his inaction, he had also ruined the next generation to bear the Dursley name as well.

While the Dursley name wasn't exactly noble, it had previously had a long and honorable history. He could trace his ancestry back and back through many generations of soldiers. He himself had broken the pattern when his family had managed to scrape together enough money to send him to a somewhat exclusive boarding school in order to see him rise from the lower middle class state that they were in into something approaching wealth, and rise he did. He'd had the house, the car, and just about everything that measured success on the salary of an executive of an international corporation. He'd been the top salesman for Grunnings Drills several years in a row and had swiftly climbed up the company ladder.

He had fallen far as well, farther than that brother of one of his ancestors who had been shipped off to Australia for being a thief, and had brought shame upon the Dursley name. Had his father lived to see this rather than having died shortly after Dudley's christening, he would have disowned him, and rightly so too. Now, he had hit rock bottom and was facing prison time, the first Dursley of his line to do so in more than three generations.

He didn't protest the proceedings too much, since he knew that he deserved it. There was discipline, and there was abuse, and he had crossed the line. While his own father would use the belt at little provocation, and would assign chores for doing wrong, he hadn't treated him as poorly as he had treated Harry. Much of his poor treatment of the boy had been out of blindness to the situation, but that was because he hadn't wanted to see and therefore chose not to see what was going on under his own roof.

He could continue to make excuses for what he had done, or he could man up like a Dursley should. Right now, he knew which he was going to choose. He was going to do his best not to bring further shame to the Dursley family name, and he would do that by manning up like a proper Dursley and taking his well deserved punishment.

&!&!&!&

In another courtroom, Petunia sat listening to the charges that were being read. While she knew she was guilty of maybe one or two of them at most, she hadn't treated the boy _that _badly. Honestly, the thing she regretted most about this situation was that she had lost Dudley. Harry had always been a burden to her, and now was no exception. If Harry hadn't been left on their doorstep, none of this would have happened. If that boy hadn't been left with them, she, Vernon, and Dudley would be at home right now living a happy, comfortable, and most importantly, normal life.

That awful boy from Spinner's End that Lily used to hang around with back in Cokeworth was sitting in the back of the courtroom observing the proceedings and sneering at her. Sitting next to him, was her poor Dudley who was sitting there with his head down, undoubtedly crying over the fate of his mother. She had no illusions that that awful boy had brought her son here as a favor to either of them. It was clear to her that he had brought her precious Dudley here just to spite her.

Eventually, her pleas of Not Guilty were entered, and the proceedings were over. The awful Snape boy who looked no cleaner now than he had when he wore his mother's grubby cast-offs when he was nine came up to her dragging her son behind him before she was wheeled away, back to her cell.

"Say goodbye to your mother boy." Snape said once the pair had reached her. "You won't be seeing her again for a very long time."

She hugged her son whose eyes were oddly dry for the last time in what could be years.

"I love you." she said.

Dudley didn't say anything, and continued to stand there silently while the bailiff wheeled her away.

&!&!&!&

Marge silently cried as her brother was led away to await sentencing. She had left Harry with Remus when she had come to support her brother, as she thought the court proceedings would be too traumatizing for the poor child. While he was starting to look like a happy, healthy, and well adjusted boy, she knew that Harry was still in a fragile state, and that something like this could trigger some sort of regression. She didn't know how he would have handled it if he'd been forced to testify if the case had gone to trial.

She knew that Vernon's punishment was undeserved, and that it had not been him who had brought shame to the Dursley name. The responsibility for that lay at the feet of the woman Vernon married, the woman who had used her feminine wiles and quite possibly an illegally obtained "magical" mind altering substance to dig her claws into him. Had he never met Petunia, none of this would have happened, and Vernon would more than likely have had a happy life with a woman who would have truly deserved her brother who had almost stopped smiling altogether after marrying Petunia.

However, there was no real magic that could take this back, and her poor brother was doomed to suffer because of his wife's actions just as her nephew had.

&!&!&!&

Snape sneered as he dropped Lily's sister's son off at Hagrid's. It had been as he suspected, the little budding sociopath was almost completely heartless. He'd gone to the arraignment wanting to see Petunia get what was coming to her, and had brought her son along because he knew it would upset her for the boy to see her like that. Petunia had always been about appearances, even when she could ill afford to be so. Back when all of them were poor, him poorer than Lily, the girl had put on airs like she was a duchess or something.

He'd half expected the Dursley boy to start wailing over the fate of his mother and cause a scene that would result in him being dragged out of the courtroom, but the child hadn't. Instead, the boy had sat through the proceedings muttering about how bored he was, but doing nothing about it for fear of reprisal if he should make a scene, having learned his lesson after the incident with Filch. When Petunia had told her son she loved him, the brat had said nothing.

It was funny really. Apparently, Petunia had spoiled the boy to the point that, rather than loving his parents, he came to see them as merely the means to fulfilling his every whim. In showing her son how much she loved him in comparison to Harry, she had ended up destroying any real love her son may have had for her. A true irony which he would savor in the years to come as he dealt with the small fragile boy that Lily had left behind when she died. A small fragile boy whose childhood Petunia had ruined, causing the child to have far more in common with him than the father he so closely resembled.

**Edited 8-25-12**


	14. Of Irony and Harry's View of Things

During his first week with Aunt Marge, Harry would have never believed you if you had told him that the woman would end up liking him, and that Dudley would be arrested before the month was out. Harry had gotten used to being punished for things he hadn't done, so when Marge had done it soon after he arrived, it had been old hat.

Back home, he was usually punished after Dudley or Aunt Petunia had sabotaged his work. Despite the fact that he knew it was futile, he did his best to get all of the chores that Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia had given him done, but just before Uncle Vernon got home, something would be ruined, and he would be punished. At Marge's however, he was punished because Dudley had been stealing sweets, and Marge blamed him because Aunt Petunia had told her that he was a thief.

At the end of that first week which had been torture since Harry couldn't run or fight back against Dudley because he wasn't sure how Marge would react considering she was a woman and therefore would be more like Petunia was during the few times she'd caught Harry defending himself however, Harry's world had been flipped on its ear. Instead of coming after him for crimes real (not that he committed any), imagined, or committed by Dudley, Marge had started going after Dudley for the things that the baby whale had done. Rather than treating Dudley like the be all, end all of the universe like she had done during her few visits to the Dursley home, Marge had refused to put up with Dudley's crap.

Nobody in the family had ever told Dudley no before, much less punished him.

After the first week, things had improved greatly for Harry who had silently wished he would never be forced to leave Aunt Marge's home while knowing that like all good things, this too would be taken from him, and it would be back to the Dursleys where he would be punished worse than ever since it would be his fault that Aunt Marge had punished Dudley. He decided to make the best of his time at Marge's because there was a good chance that he wouldn't survive whatever punishment was coming to him when he left. The fact that alongside doing chores, he was allowed to watch television, and play with the other dogs who liked him far more than Ripper did was practically heaven to him, and he savored every minute.

The day Harry had his dearest wish that a relative would come and rescue him from the Dursleys come true, had started off like any other. He'd gone out to play with the puppies, and Dudley had gone out to start trouble. The thought of not defending the puppy had never crossed his mind.

Rather than leaving him in his current sleeping area and waiting for the injuries he'd received when Dudley had kicked him instead of the puppy to go away like Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia would have done, Marge had called for an ambulance. The ambulance had taken him to a hospital where the doctors and nurses who had all looked sad had treated him kindly and asked him a number of questions that Aunt Petunia had told him to never answer.

When the doctors had told Marge what they'd seen while examining him, rather than calling him and them liars, she had told them how Aunt Petunia hadn't been treating him right. It wasn't all as Aunt Marge had said, but Aunt Petuina had hit him a bunch. Most of the time though, he was either injured by Dudley, or injured while trying to complete one of the chores Aunt Petunia or Uncle Vernon had given him. Usually when that happened, he was left in his cupboard while Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon waited for the bruises to go away.

The food situation was that bad however, and he didn't entirely know who was responsible for the lunch situation, because more often than not, Aunt Petunia would leave his lunch unattended while she fixed Dudley's extra special lunch before they left for school in the morning. By the time he checked his lunch, there was usually nothing left but a wrapper and a couple crumbs. Add that to the "No meals until..." punishment he often received, and he was lucky to get more than five meals a week aside from what food he could sneak while he was doing the cooking.

When the doctors and even Aunt Marge had assured him that he would never return to Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia, he hadn't been too certain. A teacher had said that once, but he'd been back home by the end of the day, and the teacher had been reprimanded by the school's Headmaster for making wild accusations against upstanding citizens. That teacher had been transferred to a different school a week later.

He only started to believe that he might not return to Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon after he had been taken away from Aunt Marge and been brought to a place where he had been told about his true heritage, and told that what he could do was magic. While he was there, he had been introduced to a rather scary looking but nice man who had been a childhood friend of his mother's, and another man who had been a friend of his father's who had been unable to visit him before because Aunt Petunia had filed a restraining order against him.

Remus, who had been his father's friend, had been considering going abroad in order to look for work, but had changed his mind when he'd found out what had happened to him. Soon after meeting him, he swore to do his best to protect him, and stay with him wherever he ended up going.

He ended up going right back to Aunt Marge, who had allowed Remus to stay and help look after him, and allowed Severus to visit as well.

Being at Aunt Marge's was heaven compared to living with Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon, even though the woman didn't let him get away with things, and was willing to punish him when he got into trouble. The thing was, here, he was punished for things he did, and the punishments weren't nearly as bad as the ones he got back with his aunt and Uncle. He wasn't spoiled here, but he sure as hell wasn't mistreated either. While he still had to do chores here, he was also allowed to watch television, and play with the dogs he helped tend to.

School here was far better than school back in Surrey, since he was now going to a school where there was no Dudley to chase off potential friends, and since he wasn't wearing Dudley's ruined cast-offs, he didn't look to weird. Instead of being picked last if at all, or worse, avoided at all costs because of what Dudley and his gang might do, he was amongst the first to be picked for games. Not only that, but he had been allowed to make friends, friends that he could actually bring home like Dudley had been allowed to bring his gang home.

Life with Marge Dursley was good for Harry. It wasn't perfect, but it was good. Unlike Dudley who had viewed everything she had given him aside from punishments as nothing more than what he was due, Harry never took anything Marge had given him, from food and living space to toys for granted. He'd done without long enough to know their true value, and be able to appreciate them.

The irony of the fact that he'd been rescued from the Dursleys by a Dursley wasn't lost on him either.


	15. Notice

My Nephew Harry now has a sequel, it's called My Nephew Harry 2: The Hogwarts Years.


End file.
